Entries by Luke

We have been giving some thought to what kind of Blog Friends information you might find useful to have show up in your facebook NewsFeed.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

What do you think? It’s really important we get these messages right, as not only is it a great opportunity to add value to your Blog Friends experience and to spread the word to others, but getting it wrong will annoy people and the messages will end up getting marked as “spam”! :S

Incidentally, Benjie won’t be implementing the new NewsFeed items for a couple of weeks or so (we have got to get the new Profile Box done first), but we wanted to get your feedback as soon as possible.

…which is the simplest analogy for our newly-revised concept for the Blog Friends profile box (although I have to admit that, of the three of us in the Blog Friends team, I am the only fully-fledged Apple fan, so you probably won’t hear Linux-nuts Jof and Benjie using this metaphor ; ).

As Jof said in his previous post, while people seem generally to love the new Blog Friends v1 Beta, but some of you have also told us you miss being able to control, in detail, what goes in your profile box. And many of you have not, it seems, yet realised that the real action in Blog Friends is not in the profile box at all, but in the full-page social feed reader we call the “River”.

When we conceived Blog Friends v1, we planned to have the profile box and the River function as identically as possible (and it was quite an achievement on the part of Benjie and Jof to make that happen, incidentally). Our thinking was that you would want a consistent experience throughout as much of the application as possible.

However, in the light of the very helpful feedback you users have given us, we have realised that this was not the right approach: the River is, by its nature a fluid and serendipitous experience, which is great for finding interesting new bloggers and posts, but not really suited as a showcase and/or organiser for the blogs and stuff you like best. And it seems that you have enjoyed being able to use the old Blog Friends to showcase and organise posts from yourself and your friends as much as you liked being able to discover interesting new bloggers with it.

We clearly need a re-re-think for the v1 profile box!

So, in a revised concept we have cooked up, pictured below, the profile box becomes a bit like an “iPod” to the River’s “iTunes”: you store and play back your favourite stuff in your profile box (for yourself and your friends, in Blog Friends’ case), and find interesting new blogs in your River, which mixes together lots from your Favourites plus a little from other bloggers we think you might like.

There are three sections, all optional and with optional numbers of items, in the new profile box concept: “My posts” (posts from your own blog[s], if you do indeed blog), “My favourite posts” (posts you have marked as favourites with the “thumb up” button) and “Posts from my favourite bloggers”, which are the posts from your favourite bloggers that sufficiently match your interests and/or have a certain level of “favouriting” within your community.

For a more detailed picture, here’s a mockup of the new profile box concept:

Of course, over and above the intrinsic difference between “discovery” and “showcasing” use-cases making the River metaphor less-than-ideal for the profile box, we also have the challenge of improving our feedback options and recommendation algorithms so that all the stuff we bring you in your River is interesting—whether it is sourced from/via your Favourites, Favourites of Favourites or your Extended Network (the people we reckon you may have an affinity with even though they are not in your two-degrees-of-remove social network). We do have some devilish cunning ideas in this area too, but please bear with us—Benjie’s fingers will fall off if we make him code any faster!

Going back to the new profile box concept shown above, other points we have tried to address include:

• What if people want to read more about you or another blogger you showcase? They would now be able to check out the relevant person’s Blog Friends Profile page (of which more soon);
• As a blogger, you want to know how your posts are going down across Blog Friends: the new concept would show bloggers how they are doing with headline stats;
• Some people don’t like the profile box taking up too much space: optional photo display would enable a more streamlined look;
• Feedback and support options would be included in the profile box itself, making it easier to customise and problem-solve for the profile box;
• What is this “River” anyhow, and why bother favouriting posts? The new concept makes it much more obvious that the real action is in the full-page River, and that favouriting posts will add them to your profile box.

So, what do you think? Does this new profile box concept work for you? We’ll be starting to work on some of these new features this coming week, so do let us know your thoughts in the comments—each new feature is numbered in the mockup for easy reference.

So launch day has come and gone without too much incident. Even though our database server is still indexing the several thousand blogs of our users (it always takes ages, about a day and a half, to do it from scratch, then much less time to “top it up” thereafter), and so the posts in people’s Rivers are somewhat old at the moment (UPDATE: post indexing is now completing every hour or so and posts in users’ Rivers are fresh, fresh, fresh! : ), we have already had a lot of warm words from users so far. Thanks!

However, we have also had a small handful of users bemoaning features lost (or seemingly lost) in the upgrade. This is usually couched in the form “Blog Friends was my favourite facebook app and now it’s all different!” (We are of course most honoured that so many people seem to have liked the old app so much.)

Change is sometimes hard, but change all things must if they are to they are to continue to flourish.

That is not to say we will not take all users’ feedback with great seriousness, and do our utmost to make every single user happy. We absolutely will (and we are already considering ways to give users back control over quotas for friends’ and others’ posts in their profile box).

But we are determined to make Blog Friends accessible and useful, not just to people who themselves know bloggers, but to anyone who would like to read great blog posts. And for that to be the case, we realised that we had to go beyond the social mutuality of the “friend” metaphor of the old Blog Friends (ironically, given our name) to a “favourite” or “fan” metaphor where anyone can express their particular level of interest in any given blogger—whether they are “friends” with that blogger or not.

This “author preference” mechanism should hopefully prove to be a very useful feature for highly networked users also, as it enables a much more fluid process of discovering great new bloggers: we include in your River a small number of posts from “Favourites of your Favourites” (equivalent to the old “friends of friends”), and also posts from bloggers beyond even that second degree of remove, who blog about topics you’re interested in.

In using Blog Friends v1 extensively during the Private Test period, I personally discovered many, many new favourite bloggers—I had accrued a total of over 120 by the end of the test period!

Whether you want as many great favourite authors as you can find, or a handful of superb ones, the key point to remember is that you remain in control of your Blog Friends experience with v1. In fact, you have much more and much easier control in the new version, as you can feed your preferences on authors (and topics and posts) back to us as you read!

In a nutshell, while Blog Friends v1 is designed to be a whole lot more accessible to anyone interested in reading blogs, we have also worked very hard to make it a very powerful blog reading and discovery tool for the hardest-core of our users.

Please do keep telling us what you like and what you don’t, and we will never cease from striving to meet your hopes and expectations.

Your personalised news source

Finding great news and opinions is getting harder and harder these days.

On one hand, everyone is overloaded with information. You know there’s lots of great information “out there”—if only you could find it amongst an ocean of irrelevance.

On the other hand, even the best newspapers and magazines can get, well… a bit boring. Same old topics, same old authors, same old editorial slant, day after week after month.

Enter Blog Friends!

Blog Friends is your personalised news source. We bring you a River of news, drawn from thousands of blogs from around the world. You tell us what and who you like. Then as we learn about you, we give you plenty of what you know you like—plus a little of what we have a feeling you might like.

You won’t get overloaded, but you won’t get bored either!

Enjoy it

Using Blog Friends is really easy and fun: the quality of your River of news improves all the time as your friends and broader community rate stuff they find, while you simply read and enjoy! Positive ratings of each author and blog post boost their chances of appearing in your River, and we get these ratings not only from your feedback, but also from the feedback of your community.

Ratings also help you to find the very best stuff in your River. The more Blog Friends thinks you (will) like an author, the brighter blue their posts are marked:

Note to users of the old version of Blog Friends: the people who were called your “friends” and “friends of friends” in the old Blog Friends will be assigned automatically to “Read often” and “Read sometimes” status respectively in Blog Friends v1 Beta. Also, we will automatically transfer your interests and preferences to the new service. So don’t worry, you haven’t lost anything you had, just gained a whole lot of new options!

We also indicate how popular a post is within your community:

Finally, the more of your own interests match the topics of a post, the more likely it is to appear in your River:

Shape it

We make it really easy for you to express your own opinions on individual posts and to choose the topics you read about:

And it’s a breeze to choose how often you read each author, simply by adjusting a slider:

Then simply click the “refresh” button and watch Blog Friends bring you more of what you like and less of what you don’t. Even if you haven’t changed any settings, Blog Friends will still give you a fresh set of great recommendations!

You can also choose to show anything from three hours to five days-worth of posts per page—so whether you want to track, in minute detail, the latest hot news to explode across the blogosphere, or to catch up quickly on unmissable posts after a few days away, Blog Friends is there for you.

Share it

Most importantly of all, the more friends you invite, the better your Blog Friends experience becomes. As each of your friends starts discovering great blog posts and authors, you see the best of their recommendations in your River.

Having worked long and hard to make Blog Friends v1 as good as we can, Benjie, Jof and I feel that it is one of the best, most enjoyable and social ways to find and share great blog posts. We help you tap into the knowledge and wisdom of your community—without ever losing sight of you, the unique individual.

Ok, let’s go!

If you are already a Blog Friends user, we hope you are enjoying it, and would love to hear from you in our forum. If you are new to Blog Friends, just visit the link below to get started (you will need to sign in or sign up to facebook on your way to Blog Friends).

Happy Blog Friend-ing!

Take me to Blog Friends!

I feel like a bit like a trapeze artist at the moment, arcing through the air between swings. (Admittedly I feel like a trapeze artist very definitely in a metaphorical sense only, as I put my back out yesterday and am hobbling around the flat!)

We took the current Blog Friends service down a few minutes ago, and are now working furiously to get Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for prime time—hopefully sometime later today.

So whether you are an existing or would-be user of Blog Friends, please bear with us: we very much hope the wait will be more than worthwhile.

And the view up here is amaaaaaaaaaazing! ; )

Since we opened the Blog Friends v1 Private Beta last week, we have been busy tweaking features and fixing any number of little bugs, with much help from our stalwart Beta testers (thanks guys!).

We now seem to have got the new service working pretty well in Firefox, and we are turning our attention to testing in other browsers.

Bug-squishing aside, the other thing we are determined to do is to serve anyone who wants to find great blog posts—be they a Robert Scoble with thousands of facebook friends and the ability to skim read an even greater number of blog posts every day, or someone like my mum, who isn’t into geeky stuff, gets her news from a newspaper, doesn’t read blogs yet and wants something that “just works” like her iPod.

This is a trickier challenge than you might imagine, but we’re getting more and more confident we can crack it. A key point seems to be maintaining a balance between giving users plenty of stuff they know they like (from their favourite bloggers and on their favourite topics) on one hand but also making it easy for them to check out stuff they might like on the other.

A mix of a traditional feedreader and social blog discovery engine, you might say, all blended into a single River of easy-to-use goodness. Except all that users need to know is that it’s a great way to discover and follow interesting blogs and blog posts.

Anyhow, you will notice that I have included a sneak peek of v1 in this post (although it looks like Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK scooped me!) All you need to do to sign up for it is:

a) if you’re an existing Blog Friends user, sit tight. Your facebook profile box will update in about a week’s time, and you can click through from there to the main, full-page application;

b) if you’re not a Blog Friends user yet (and if not, why not?!), simply add the current version of the service and you will also find it updated early next week.

Blog Friends—it’s as easy as falling off a log, only more fun and informative.

It’s hard to believe that I was posting up to three times daily on weaverluke, my personal blog, just a few months ago. Since dedicating myself to creating, launching and growing Blog Friends with Jof and Benjie in June this year, my to-do list has been continuously overflowing with design, administrative and business tasks, leaving little room in my schedule let alone my head for blogging.

That said, the real problem has not been a lack of time—it’s been a profound shift of point of view on my part. For three years, I was on the outside looking in on the world of web-enabled business. Sitting on a cloud at 15,000 feet and surveying the landscape stretching out below me became a comfortable habit, and the resulting insights and musings ended up on weaverluke blog.

Not that I wasn’t working diligently throughout those three years to realise my “i-together” vision of a world where each individual could explore and express their unique identity in rich community contexts. Far from it: I dedicated much of my spare time and my life savings (and then some), to create with various programmers three prototype applications of that vision, and wrote any number of supporting business plan drafts. Then Facebook’s Platform came along, and I realised that there was a great market opportunity for a very specific aspect of the i-together vision—the social blog post sharing and discovery service that is now Blog Friends.

Soon afterwards Jof, Benjie and I launched Blog Friends into the world, rapidly gaining real users with real opinions and preferences. There were suddenly a million things to do by yesterday just to keep the service running, let alone planning and building new service features, iterating the business plan, networking with potential employees, partners and investors, and lastly—but actually most importantly—communicating one-to-one with our wonderful and loyal users.

June, July, August, September, October… The months have sped by and my blog has languished. Ironic that I’ve co-created a service for bloggers and blog readers, yet seem to have lost my own blogging mojo so catastrophically.

But with the launch of this Blog Friends blog—and my determination to revive weaverluke blog also—all this has to change!

So how could what my blogging has been transition into something that supports and is fed by what my life has become? In other words, what’s the common thread (a weaver always needs a thread) that runs through my passions for identity and for Blog Friends?

Considering that question for a moment, I realise that as we adjust the designs for Blog Friends v1 by a pixel here, a shade of blue there, and as we plough through the nitty gritty numbers of the i-together business plan, it is all too easy for me to forget what so excited me about i-together and Blog Friends in the first place.

We are all preciously unique, but we have so much in common too. We thrive when we acknowledge and celebrate both our individuality and our commonalities.

I wanted to create a service that taps into these insights to help people discover and share stuff that really interests them, easily and intuitively. And I really feel that with the forthcoming “v1″ release of Blog Friends, we are getting a whole lot closer to that goal.

V1 introduces a full-page feed reader, rich feedback options to tune your topic and author preferences and a whole lot more. Jof, Benjie and I have been grafting away for a couple of months on v1, and we’re just days away from launching it into private beta testing now (do let me know, along with your facebook id please, if you’d like an invitation!).

Anyhow, this rambling and anecdotal post has wandered off topic, just like my mind has wandered from the purity and abstraction of “identity” these last months into the challenge of actually making something with and for real people! Because at the end of the day, it’s all about relationship, right, this identity stuff? About sharing your passion and dreams with others, and witnessing them in theirs.

Hopefully, I can start to do some more of that on this blog and at weaverluke from now on.

Oh, and—happy Blog Friend-ing!